Exlamatives and exclamatory acts in English and Vietnamese

This paper investigates some typical exclamative structures in English and Vietnamese as well as analyzes the uses of these sentences in performing the illocutionary acts known as exclamatory acts according to speech act theory.(Austin, 1962; Searle, 1979; Yule, 1987). The study follows a descriptive and contrastive design, choosing English as the source language and Vietnamese as the target one. To begin with, exclamative sentences in the both languages will be described and categorized in terms of syntactic features. Then, a group of exclamatory acts will be identified and classified according to their discourse functions. Finally, some similarities and differences of exclamative structures and exclamatory acts in the two languages will be identified in order to help learners of English and those of Vietnamese be aware of different ways of expressing affective meaning.